Latest market data

Stock search

Your startup is a vulnerable social organism. If you have five or
10 employees and they are working well together, your startup
could easily be wiped out if you hire someone who
doesn't fit into your culture.

How so? Imagine that everyone in your startup acts according to
your values of respecting a high IQ, teamwork and
obsession with customer satisfaction. And then you find you can't
keep up with the demand for your company's product and you're
desperate to bring in a new engineer.

In your haste, you find someone who received top grades from the
California Institute of Technology but seems a little
anti-social. When you assemble members of your team to decide
whether to hire him, a few people express some hesitation. But
you decide to overrule them and hire the engineer anyway. After
all, you reason, the market for hiring talent
is competitive that you can't afford to pass up the
chance to bring such a brainy coder to help with
the workload.

Six months later, the new hire has infuriated everyone else in
the company, and your chief of engineering and the rest of the
engineering staff threaten to quit unless you fire that new
engineer. From the moment he joined the company, he started
giving off bad signals, skipping team meetings, refusing to
let other engineers review his code and insisting that he is
smarter than everyone else and need not listen to
customers.

Wouldn't it be great if you could keep yourself from making such
a huge hiring mistake? Here are five steps to take that will
block such barbarians from getting through your startup's hiring
gate:

You may be thinking, "Do I really need to do this?" You might be
skeptical about values if you're an engineer or mathematician
with limited experience managing other people. But if you have
managed others, you know that unless everyone in the company
shares your values, you're going to lose talented people and
suffer from weak productivity.

Justin Moore, CEO of Axcient, a Mountain View, Calif-based
provider of recovery services, told me in 2011 that CEOs should
spent 20 percent of their time on culture. Moore advises
leaders of startup teams to ask probing questions: "Who am
I? What is important to me? What values do I have that contribute
to the success of my startup's customers and employees?" Based on
the answers to such questions, they can develop a list of no more
than five core values.

Consider the values of SHERPA, a startup being developed by
my Babson College students that helps people buy
and sell textbooks. It cleverly picked values that are consistent
with the above questions and that are easy to
remember: sociability, honesty, eagerness, respect, perseverance
and accountability.

Use the interview process to look for people who don't fit with
your company's values. Do this having managers agree on a
list of interview questions.

One way to start off such an interview might be to ask
the candidate what values he or she would like to see in an
employer. Listen to the answer and then explain
your startup's values. If there is little overlap, that
would be a good sign of a weak fit.

Ask a question to see whether a candidate would act according to
your startup's values. For example, a test of teamwork might
be: "Imagine that you're sitting with other candidates waiting to
give a presentation to the hiring manager. What would you do
while waiting?"

Most people would say that they would read through their
presentation. The candidates you want to hire,
however, would say they would offer to listen to the
presentations of the other people waiting and give feedback to
help them improve.

Be sure to conduct the interview assessing cultural
fit the first time you meet the candidate. That way, you can
stop interviewing people who don't fit -- perhaps even in
the middle of the first meeting. This will keep you
from being tempted to hire someone with needed hard skills but
who does not align perfectly with your company's culture.

You're wasting time for your company and the candidate if you
spend more time than necessary to determine cultural fit.

Examining 10 references sounds way too high. But most candidates
will give you three to five references -- people they
believe will give glowing reports. Figure out how to get
references beyond the ones the candidate provides.

See if you know anyone who worked with the candidate at
a previous employer. Or use LinkedIn or an alumni database
to find the people who can connect you to
other references.

In addition to checking the basic facts the
candidate provides ask the references questions to help you
determine if the candidate is in sync with the
company's values. It's a good sign if the references
you found independently confirm what the candidate
said.

Before you make an offer, assemble a team of people who
interviewed the candidate and ask them to vote on the hiring.
Ideally hire only candidates when there's complete agreement. If
you can't get consensus, be sure to hear the reasons why some
team members vote no.

And if any team member can make a good case that the candidate
does not fit with your startup's values, block that barbarian
before he enters your startup's gate.